Memoir of a Russian Punk

24

During the next half-hour Eddie-baby shakes at least a hundred hands, and he receives so many approving slaps that his shoulder aches. He wanders through the crowd on the square with Kadik, greets people he knows, and from time to time one of their acquaintances, taking out from under the flaps of his coat the ubiquitous biomitsin or portvesha – port, that is – gives the two of them a drink. The results of the poetry contest will be announced after an interval of dancing – after the jury, consisting of some completely unknown cultural figures and activists, has finished deliberating inside the movie theater – although all the kids are sure that Eddie will get first prize.

"First prize is yours, old buddy. It's in the bag," Kadik says. "You can rest easy. I listened carefully to all the other poets, and they don't come close," he says. "It's your good luck, old buddy, that there weren't any women poets or members of national minorities in the contest, Chukchis or Evenks, say. Otherwise the jury would award first prize to one of them, even if the poems were complete horseshit. That's the policy now at all the People's Festivals. They give them prizes to encourage them," Kadik says, "so they'll develop."

"Right," mutters the skeptical Vitka Golovashov, who is standing with them. "I wonder, what do you think the prize will be? They'll probably give you some crap. A book probably."

"They should award money," Eddie says. "Even if it's only a little."

"I once won a velveteen bear at a shooting gallery," Kadik says, "shooting at moving targets. I gave the bear to a certain girl who later fucked me for it."

"Kadik's probably lying," Eddie thinks. Kadik never told Eddie about that experience. Of course, he's not telling the story to Eddie but to Vitka, so it's forgivable.

Somebody's hands suddenly cover Eddie's eyes. Eddie tries to break loose, but the hands are strong ones. After a brief struggle he manages to grab his opponent by the leg and flip him onto the pavement in front of him.

"Oh, you motherfucker!" the opponent says with a slight lisp, and up from the pavement jumps the smiling Arkashka Yepkin. "What the fuck did you do that for?" he asks, although he isn't offended. "The wrestlers have gotten together and are tossing other people around…"

The wrestlers are Eddie-baby and Vitka Golovashov. Vitka is of course an experienced wrestler with a third-class rating, whereas Eddie is still considered a beginner, but even so, "the wrestlers have gotten together."

"Why don't you boxers put up your fists, then?" Vitka answers for Eddie.

Arkashka assumes a boxer's crouch, and Vitka a wrestler's. They circle around each other for a while, clearing a space in the crowd for themselves. The onlookers shout encouragement to them: "All right, let's go, let's see what you can do!" "Show us what you've got!" Vitka and Arkashka, however, have no intention of grappling. After circling around some more and then, as they say in Saltovka, giving each other "tenners" – slapping both their hands together palm to palm, in other words – they finally greet each other:

"Hey, you dipshit boxer!" Vitka declares.

"Hey, you fucking wrestler!" Arkashka replies.

They respect each other. Vitka is regarded as a wrestler with real prospects, and Arkashka is a very good boxer. Very. Even though he's only just starting out.

There are three Yepkin brothers. Two of them are boxers. The third is still too young, but he's already begun waving his fists around. Their mother is Russian, and their father is a "Chuchmek," as they say in Saltovka – some kind of Asiatic, that is, either Uzbek or Kazakh. Whatever the case, all the Yepkins have flat oriental mugs, the sly, narrow eyes of Mongol khans, muscular yellow bodies, and very good boxer's temperaments. Eddie-baby has yellow skin too, although of course not the same kind as Arkashka Yepkin has. Arkashka's face is yellow, whereas Eddie's face and hands are much whiter than the rest of his body.

"Great job, Ed, you old cocksucker!" Arkashka shouts. Sometimes Arkashka hangs out at the benches under the lindens by right of being an athlete, and so he knows about their idiotic flourish. Eddie isn't offended – Arkashka's just teasing him. Whenever necessary, he sticks up for Eddie and quietly backs him in a fight, even though as a boxer he's not supposed to get involved in street fighting – he could be disqualified.

At that moment up to the microphone steps some bald old fart whom the master of ceremonies has identified as the Kharkov writer Boris Kotlyarov, if Eddie has heard right.

"Kotlyarov?" he asks the kids.

"Yah, something like that… Kuntlyarov…," the always mocking Yepkin answers.

"That's right, Eddie, it's Kotlyarov," Kadik confirms as he listens in annoyance. Kadik doesn't like Yepkin, or Dipkin, as he calls him, and maybe he's afraid of him, because he always gets nervous when Dipkin's around. "He's already getting nervous," Eddie thinks, "and pretty soon he'll be on his way." Kadik obviously resents Eddie's other friends, and he avoids the punks in particular.

After a speech of several minutes whispered into the microphone, so that even the attentive Kadik can't hear anything, Eddie-baby finally hears the "Kharkov writer" Kotlyarov pronounce his name.

"Go on! Go on." The kids push him forward. "It's first prize. Go on!"

Eddie, Vitka Golovashov, Yepkin, Kadik, and Lyonka Korovin, Vitka's invariable drinking partner and friend, who has just joined them, all push forward to the steps, duck under the rope surrounding the stage, and move in the direction of the microphone.

"Not everybody! Not everybody! Just Eduard!" the alarmed master of ceremonies says, stopping them. "Eduard, you go over to Comrade Kotlyarov, please. And you guys wait here."

Eddie goes up to the "Kharkov writer." Eddie has never in his life heard of the writer Kotlyarov, but who cares about that?

"Congratulations!" Kotlyarov says to him. "Permit me to shake your hand, poet Eduard Savenko," Kotlyarov says, opening and closing his pink mouth in his pink face, "and to award you," he continues, "this certificate of victory in the poetry contest of the Stalin District House of Culture."

"Certificate?" Eddie thinks. "What the fuck do I need with your certificate! What about the prize?"

"Let's give a big hand, comrades, to the winner of the poetry contest!" the master of ceremonies says to the crowd after running up to the microphone.

The crowd loudly claps its hands the same way that penguins in the Kharkov zoo slap their flippers together. For a while the noise thunders over the square, and the Saltovka and Tyurenka punks roar and whistle as their contribution to the tumult. Eddie-baby sticks the certificate in his pocket and is about to leave when a small object wrapped in red paper appears in the writer's hand.

"In addition to the certificate, allow me, Comrade Savenko, to give you this gift as a memento," says the pink Kotlyarov.

"Right!" yell Yepkin, Vitka, Lyonka, and Kadik from where they're standing next to the rope. "Right!"

Eddie takes the package from the writer, and they once again shake hands. The crowd, no longer interested in the show, claps weakly. Eddie runs down the steps to his friends. Yepkin, seizing the red package from his hands, immediately begins to tear off the wrapping paper, while the master of ceremonies has already begun to announce the next attraction on the program, a tug-of-war for those wishing to participate.

"Dominoes!" Yepkin howls in disappointment. "The faggots! They couldn't give you anything more valuable than that, not even a small radio? Dominoes!" he says again with contempt.

All come to the unanimous conclusion that the House of Culture got greedy and that its administration probably drank up the money that had been set aside for the prizes and instead bought whatever crap they could find. All the other participants in the contest received their prizes earlier, so nobody knows what they got, but obviously it was shit too.

Yepkin whistles scornfully, and so does Lyonka, but not Kadik and Vitka. Eddie, however, indifferently sticks the box of dominoes in his pocket.

"I'll give them to Uncle Sasha," he says. "Let the old guys slap them around. Their set's pretty badly broken from the way they bang the dominoes down on the table. They're an excitable lot, the goat herd!"

The kids squeeze through the crowd.

"We ought to have a drink to celebrate," Vitka Golovashov observes.

"Right, a drench in honor of the first prize," Lyonka says in support of his pal. "It's on you, Ed."

"I'll run to the store," Yepkin readily volunteers. By offering to go to the store, Arkashka is hoping to compensate for his usual lack of funds. He's not always able to chip in like the other kids, since his family's large and poor.

Eddie digs in the pocket of his jacket and removes the crumpled certificate, which Kadik at once grabs from him to look at, and then some money.

"It's my treat," Eddie says, and pours into Yepkin's palm all the change he took from the cafeteria and all the rubles. "There's about thirty rubles there, Dipkin," he announces. "Buy biomitsin for everybody."

"Four bottles?" Yepkin asks.

"If it comes out to four, then buy four," Eddie answers. He has decided that it is after all almost ten o'clock and Svetka has probably gotten stuck somewhere with her mother in Dnepropetrovsk, and thirty rubles won't save him anyway.

Yepkin for some reason counts the change again. Vitka hands him more money. Vitka always has cash.

"Here!" Kadik says to Eddie, returning the certificate. "Show it to Svetka when she gets back. Let the girl see it. It's material evidence of the talent of her old buddy."

"Where's she getting back from?" Yepkin responds to Kadik's observation. "Where did she go? I saw her just yesterday."

"How could you see her yesterday," Eddie cautiously asks Yepkin, "if she and her mother left yesterday morning to visit their relatives in Dnepropetrovsk?"

Eddie suddenly feels the anxiety rising up in him again, and almost knowing beforehand what Yepkin's answer will be, he still hopefully asks him,

"Are you sure you saw her yesterday? Maybe it was a few days ago…"

"Do I look like a lunatic?" Yepkin asks, his round Mongol face staring and his cropped head thrust forward. "I saw her last night coming out of her building with another girl and Shurik Ivanchenko. They were carrying satchels with them."

After blurting all this out, Yepkin suddenly realizes that he has probably said something he shouldn't have, since all the kids have fallen silent and are looking at Eddie.

"That means she's betrayed me," Eddie thinks. "That's exactly right. She's betrayed me. She didn't go to Dnepropetrovsk or anywhere else, she stayed home and spent the holidays with Shurik." For some reason, Eddie-baby recalls the sparse blond moustache of the seventeen-year-old Shurik and imagines Shurik kissing Svetka, the soft moustache touching her cheek. As far as Eddie is concerned, Shurik is a slave and a fool and has been all his life, and will still be working in his shoe store when Eddie is accomplishing great deeds, but Svetka seems to regard him quite differently. Eddie-baby sees what Shurik is, that he's a fop and an asshole, and that it's about people like him that they sing in the thieves' song that "a fop in a satin tie / is now kissing you by the gate…" The words really apply, even the stuff about the tie, since the neatly dressed Shurik always wears one. "The whore!" Eddie says, his blood boiling. "What am I supposed to do now?" he thinks, and then notices the gazes fixed on him.

"Are the two of you still going together?" Yepkin asks guiltily. "I thought you had broken up a long time ago -"

"Well, are you going to the store or not?" Kadik asks him angrily. "If you're going, go!"

"I'm going!" Yepkin snarls in reply. "Don't yell at me, or you'll be sorry!"

"If you don't want to go, I will," Kadik says in a more conciliatory tone.

Yepkin leaves, and Kadik tries to calm Eddie down:

"Well, fuck her, then, fuck Svetka, Ed. You need a real girl, not that snot-nosed minor. She doesn't even have real legs," Kadik says. "They're matchsticks instead of legs."

"Goddamn!" Eddie thinks sadly. "Svetka's legs are better than anybody's. They're long and straight and not matchsticks at all. There's just not very much flesh on them yet, since she's only fourteen, but there will be. Svetka's beautiful, she's like something from a dream," Eddie thinks. "What can I do? What can I do?" he reasons feverishly. "Cut Shurik?" Eddie imagines cutting up the face, moustache, and tie of the hated Shurik with his straight razor. "Ftt! Ftt! Ftt!" the razor whizzes. From the deep, instantly swelling gashes on Shurik's cheeks, nose, and mouth dark red blood suddenly starts to flow. "You bastard! You bastard! You snake! Don't you dare touch my Svetka!"

"Eddie! Eddie!" Kadik's voice reaches him from somewhere far away, as if from Slavka's Vladivostok. "Eddie!"